Part 1 – Backyard Prisoners

The purpose of this website is to show that mass incarceration is caused by prisoner disenfranchisement. The exponential growth in incarceration in the United States that occurred throughout the 20th century, and the escalating racial disparities that came with it, would not have occurred if not for disenfranchisement. Nor will those things go away, as long as we deny prisoners the right to vote.

You probably think most people, given the choice,Â wouldÂ prefer not living near a prison.Â A prison is practically the dictionary definition of something nobody wants in their own backyards.

“NIMBY (Not In My BackYard)Â : opposition to the locating of something considered undesirable (as a prison or incinerator) in one’s neighborhood.”

“Best of all, it’s easy money according to Folsom, California Finance Director Dave Sanders who is quoted in the Sacramento Bee as stating ‘The prisons are self-contained islands that don’t really cost us anything,’ Sanders said. ‘I don’t see a negative side to having them in the community.'”

That windfall has nothing to do with creating jobs or producing economic growth.Â Â Prisons are valuable, surprisingly, because of the census. They say “nothing beats having a prison in town when census time rolls around.”

âSome cities go down on their knees during the decennial census, begging their residents to be counted. Folsom, Susanville and Ione do not beg. Those three towns can relax, smug in the knowledge that a big chunk of their population cannot escape enumeration. Or escape, period. Nothing beats having a prison in town when census time rolls around.â

When the census is taken, the Census Bureau adds the prisoners to the population ofÂ the towns in which they are incarcerated, as opposed to their real home towns.Â This is a controversial policy for several reasons, mostly having to do with the disproportionately negative effect it has on minority communities.Â For now, the important point is that prisoners increase census results, so the more prisoners there are in any given town, the bigger the population is, and the more that town gets of everything distributed based on census results. This can include money, but most importantly, it means more representation in government.

Theoretically, that extra representative-power should go to the prisoners, but it doesn’t, because, in America, prisoners cannot vote.Â It’s incarceration without representation.Â Â Because the prisoners can’t vote, they are exploited, not represented.

âBecause the prisoners cannot vote but are counted as constituents, they are not represented, and they are totally exploited.â

AndÂ because district boundaries are based on census numbers, a local prison ends up having an effect similar to gerrymandering.Â In fact, it’s called “prison-based gerrymandering.”Â

“Counting inmates at their correctional institutions encouragesprison-based gerrymandering, by which state lawmakers draw legislative districts that consist partly or even mainly of prison populations, even though inmates are denied the right to vote in all but two states. This enhances the political power of the mainly rural districts where prisons are built and undercuts the influence of the urban districts where many inmates came from.”

Because all voting districts are supposed to have the same number of people, the more prisoners there are in one district, the fewer non-prisoners, who do have the right to vote, there will be.Â The result is fewer people to whom the lawmakers are held accountable.

“It’s almost the perfect crime. A legislator gets extra influence without having to be accountable to more constituents, and the data says the district is legit.”

Essentially, this lets the lawmakers exploit a large number of people, andÂ also guarantees those people won’t show up on election day to voteÂ them out of office – for any reason.

“Streets that were paved in chipped gravel and oil for generations soon will all be covered with asphalt. An $850,000 community center that doubles as a gym and computer lab for the school across the street is being paid for with prison money, [Mayor Andy] Hutchens said.

Because state and federal tax revenue is figured per capita, a prison population that puts no strains on village services is a permanent windfall for a little town such as Ina, Hutchens said.

‘It really figures out this way: This little town of 450 people is getting the tax money of a town of 2,700,’ Hutchens said, and then adds with a grin, ‘And those people in that prison can’t vote me out of office.'”

“The prisons are also a source of political power to upstate Republicans because the inmates are counted as permanent residents when legislative districts are drawn â even though they cannot vote and their actual homes may be hundreds of miles away.”

“That’s because the Census Bureau counts prisoners as residents of the towns they are incarcerated in, instead of the neighborhoods they lived in before being locked up. The result: Every calculation that uses Census data–from federal funding formulas to drawing state legislative districts–gives more money and representation to communities with prisons than they would get if reckoning were based solely on their non-incarcerated populations. That makes prisoners a hot commodity that everyone wants to claim.“

781-408-6384 City Limits. City Limits Community Information Service, Inc. 2004

But prisons aren’t easy to get.Â There’s too much competition.

“But Mr. Poland does not expect Chesterfield, an Adirondack town almost 150 miles north of Albany, to have a prison handed to it. No, sir. There is too much competition from other towns.”

“Rural counties and small towns give up a lot to gain what they hope will be more: offering financial assistance and concessions such as donated land, upgraded sewer and water systems, housing subsidies, and, in the case of private prisons, property and other tax abatements.”

“Although Governor Cuomo and New York legislative leaders are not expected to decide for several days how many prisons the state will build, several towns have begun frantic lobbying efforts to secure one.”

âHundreds of small rural towns and several whole regions,â writes Tracy Huling, author of several books and articles about incarceration, ââ¦are now begging for prisons to be built in their backyards.â

miscegenator,Â by Tracy Huling,Â from Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, The New Press. 2002Â /diigo.com/07ka6m

“Romulus, a town in the Finger Lakes region that recently made the list of possible sites, has sent scores of postcards to the state correction commissioner pleading for a prison. And Chateaugay, a town near the Canadian border, has sent several hundred form letters with a similar message.”

“Once the state’s Five Points prison opens here in August, Romulus will be home to 3,200 free-ranging souls and 2,200 inmates. The free-rangers aren’t complaining. ”It’s a salvation to us,” said Mr. Zajac, who has run this Finger Lakes town as the elected supervisor for 29 years.”

And once you get a prison, allÂ you need is a few hundred rapists or car thieves and it’s party time.

“So when Hardin officials announced this week that they had signed a deal with a California company to fill the empty jail, it was naturally a cause for celebration. Â Town officials talked about throwing a party to mark the occasion.”

But the lure of a prison is intoxicating, and it can be hard to stop at just one.

“Most of the towns that are seeking new prisons are not strangers to the world of ”correctional facilities.” Some of the towns, like Wawarsing in the Catskills, already have one prison and are hoping to attract another. “

“Some environmentalists, like Michael G. DiNunzio of the Adirondack Council, even question whether it is constitutional for the state to build prisons on sites it acquires inside the park, like the one proposed in Chesterfield.Â ”I’m very concerned,” he said. There are already a half-dozen prisons inside the park and another half dozen around the perimeter.”

Of course, it’s not really the prisons that these people are after.Â What they want areÂ the prisoners.Â A prison with no prisoners is no good.Â Consider the town ofÂ Hardin, Montana.Â They didn’t beg or plead for a prison, they just went ahead and built one.

“The $27 million facility, which was built with revenue bonds, went into default last year. Bond payments are being made out of a reserve fund, which will have to be replenished and payments made, once revenue starts.”

“Smith said it is his job to ‘uncover every rock’ to find ways to get the detention center operating. He knows there are options available, it’s just a matter for finding them and seeking out contracts. People who don’t like the idea of alleged enemy combatants coming to town can help, he said. ‘To those who don’t want it, help us find something so we can fill it,’ Smith said.”

but they couldn’t findÂ any prisoners. Â They even requestedÂ terrorists from Guantanamo Bay

“Two Rivers Detention Facility has been in media headlines from Chile to Norway and across the United States since its owners announced in late April that they were seeking to hold alleged terrorists being held at Guantanamo Bay.”

(a Hardin official said “unofficial redneck patrol”Â would protect them from terrorism).

“The jail’s No. 1 promoter, Greg Smith, executive director of Hardin’s economic development agency, said the Two Rivers Detention Center could easily be retrofitted to increase security. And while the town hasn’t had its own police force since the 1970s, Smith said the jail’s well-armed neighbors would constitute an “unofficial redneck patrol.””

No matter who they asked, nobody wouldÂ share their prisoners with Hardin. Â Not very Christian of you, America!

“The bonds were declared to be in technical default in 2008, and there followed years of sometimes-desperate attempts to find some sort of paying use for the jail. Hardin tried contracting with counties, states, tribal organizations and the federal government, all to no avail.”

Of course nobody wouldÂ share their prisoners.Â This is more than just dollars.

“And there in the middle of the parade is a float carrying a giant banner that reads ‘Save Camp Gabriels.’ Gabriels is a minimum-security prison camp, one of four state facilities slated for closure. Mary Ellen Keith, a local government official and activist, urged for keeping the prison open at a rally last month. ‘We can’t lose this â this is more than just dollars! This is life. This is our heritage,’ she said.”

The lawmakers – the people in charge, that is – of the communities that have lots of prisoners, can’t be giving them out to people – they needÂ to keep them where they are.Â They needÂ the power they generate. Â It’s likeÂ The Matrix.Â

Â

If the local prisons started closing down, those elected officials would lose the prison-based gerrymandering effect they covet so highly. Worse yet, the local area may no longer have enough people in it to qualify as a legislative district at all, in which case,Â these powerful people lose their jobs – because the jobs don’t exist anymore.

Elizabeth OâC. Little, a Republican state senator, represents a rural Upstate district larger in square miles than Rhode Island and Connecticut combined. But more than 13,500 of her constituents are not living there by choice, they could not vote for her if they wanted to, and most will leave the first chance they get.Â Â Those unwilling constituents are incarcerated in one ofÂ 13 prisons â 12 state and one federal â that have given her district the nickname âLittle Siberia.âÂ Without the prisoners, the district, which stretches to the Canadian border, may not have the minimum population required to earn a seat in the state Senate.

Lawmakers in that position don’t want you to even think about taking their prisoners.Â Â

“Moving to reverse decades of expansion, Gov. Eliot Spitzer is proposing a commission to study closing some of New York State’s dozens of prisons…Behind Mr. Spitzer’s proposal lies a recognition that New York’s prison population, which peaked in 1999 at more than 71,000 inmates, has rapidly declined since….But a powerful alliance of upstate lawmakers and correction officers’ unions guard their constituents’ and members’ state-financed jobs and are likely to resist any effort to downsize the system…”I’m very concerned about the commission,” said Senator Elizabeth O’C. Little, a Republican whose Adirondacks district includes 12 prisons and prison camps. Five of them are in Franklin County, which has roughly one inmate for every 10 residents, according to census figures, the highest concentration in the state.”

There are a lot of lawmakers in that position.Â In upstate New York alone there are seven districts that only meet the population requirements because the prisoners are there.

“A startling analysis by Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative found seven upstate New York Senate districts meeting the population requirements only because inmates were included in the count.”Â

“In many rural county and city governments, substantial portions of individual districts consist of incarcerated people, not actual residents. In a number of places, we’ve found elected officials who owe a majority of their clout to prison populations.”

How do you think lawmakers in that position would feel on issues of criminal Justice? Would you expect them to be pro, against, or neutral on things like mandatory minimum sentences, or âthree-strikes and youâre outâ laws?Â How about legal aid? Appellate rights? Evidentiary burdens? What kind of drug laws would you expect from a lawmaker whose job security goes up and down with the prison population?

And what would you expect to happen to a country where the lawmakers can generate political power for themselves by putting people in prison?

While you’ve got those questions in the back of your mind, let’s change the subject, and talk about one of the world’s most famously unsolvable mysteries:Â

The Mysterious Deterioration of the American Criminal Justice System

Let me tell you what we do and don’t know about mass incarceration in the U.S.Â Most people know the U.S. prison population grew exponentially for a long time, leaving America with more prisoners than any virtually any other country.Â Â And most people know American incarceration grew in a racially disparate way, resulting in a large and rapidly growing overrepresentation of African Americans throughout the penal system.Â For those people who don’t know that, here’s somebody saying it.

“We will indeed see in this chapter that the massive and rapidly growing over-representation of African Americans at all levels of the penal system expresses the new role that the latter has assumed in the panoply of instruments of racial domination since the ghetto uprisings of the 1960s.”

It’s not bad people, it’s bad Law

We know, first of all, that mass incarceration is not the result of mass crime.Â Most of the experts believe the increases in incarceration were due to changes in law designed to increase incarceration, not changes in crime rates.

âWhile the U.S. has a higher rate of violent crime than many comparable nations, most scholars in the field attribute the dramatic increase in the use of prison almost entirely to changes in policy, and not crime rates. That is, policymakers at all levels of government have enacted laws and procedures designed to send more people to prison and to keep them in prison for longer periods of time.â

In other words,Â increasing incarceration was the goal of these changes in law.Â ButÂ they weren’t trying to fight crime. The tougher laws were pursuedÂ for politicalÂ reasons. That much is well understood.

“It is well understood thatthe shifting crime control policies that led to these patterns in imprisonment were products of political decisions by elected officials to be ‘tougher’ on crime generallyâ¦â

â5135255789â Pamela E. Oliver and James E. Yocom University of Wisconsin, pageÂ 3

Some experts say the lawmakers knew the new laws would not reduce crime, but pursued them anywayÂ because they expected to get some political benefit by doing so.

“Tonryâs (1997) account of the late 1980s âwar on drugsâ argues that policy makers knew the âwarâ would have no effect on drug use and would be racially disparate, but chose to do it anyway because of the potential political benefits in announcing a policy that would be popular.”

âThe evidence is overwhelming that the spiraling imprisonment of African Americans is due largely to the political decisions and organizational incentives around the drug war.Â Nationally, the policies were put in place because the people advocating them expected to benefit from the policies.â

So that’s what we do know.Â What don’t we know?Â What we don’t know isÂ what is it that perpetually motivates American policymakers to get tougher and tougher on crime?

“In the simplest sense, we know what happened and why.Â Between 1975 and 1995, policymakers enacted a wide range of laws meant to make punishments severer, and practitioners applied those laws. These included three-strikes-and-youâre-out laws requiring minimum 25-year sentences; 10-, 20- and 30-year minimum sentences for violent, firearms and drug offenses; LWOPs; laws permitting prosecutions of tens of thousands of young people each year as adults; and laws extending the reach of capital punishment. Independently of policy changes, practitioners became more punitive and risk-averse: prosecutors charged and bargained more aggressively, judges sent more people to prison and for longer, parole boards released fewer prisoners, and later, and returned parolees to prison more often.Â What we donât know is why American policymakers, nearly alone among leaders of western governments, chose to enact such harsh policies and Laws, or why practitioners became so much tougher.”

So, decade after decade the tougher laws piled up, gradually turning a system designed to administer justice into a system designed to put people in prison whether they deserve it or not.Â And it changed the United States. The Land of the Free became a “nation of jailers,” a “leviathan unmatched in human history.“

“Simply put, we have become a nation of jailers and, arguably, racist jailers at that. The past four decades have witnessed a truly historic expansion, and transformation, of penal institutions in the United States â at every level of government, and in all regions of the country. We have, by any measure, become a vastly more punitive society. Measured in constant dollars and taking account of all levels of government, spending on corrections and law enforcement in the United States has more than quadrupled over the last quarter century. As a result, the American prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history. This development should be deeply troubling to anyone who professes to love liberty.”

“It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed. ‘In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,’ Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in ‘Democracy in America.’â

“Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States ‘a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.’â

â’Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America isviewed with horror,‘ James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. ‘Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.’â

Mass incarceration did not start in the 1970s or 80s with the war on drugs, as many people think.Â This is a myth.Â Just like with all exponential growth, only the recent increases are noticeable.Â But if you focus on the earlier years, as in the picture below, you can see that the American prison population grew exponentially in both halves of the 20th century.

Scholars writing in the 1950s about the dramatic rise in incarceration that happened in the 20s and 30s, said the same things that modern scholars say about the more recent increases – that it was due to changes in law.

“Characterizing the trends in imprisonment in the United States, Barnes and Teeters wrote, in 1959: âin 1931, 76 per cent of all the inmates of federal and state prisons had been incarcerated for committing acts that had not been crimes 15 years earlier.’ The authors noted that, since 1900, 500,000 new state laws had been enacted in the United States, and they characterized this country as an ‘over criminalized society,’ with the recently enacted ‘victimless crimes’ contributing significantly to the high rates of incarceration.

Trends in Incarceration in the United States since 1880: A Summary of Reported Rates and the Distribution of Offenses. Margaret Cahalan. Crime Delinquency 1979, at 9.

So, in both halves of the 20th century, the United States experienced an exponential increase in incarceration, and both times it was the result of changes in law, particularly laws relating to drug crimes, or other crimes often considered “victimless.”Â It’s obviously the same phenomenon. We just don’t know what motivated the lawmakers to pass these laws.Â That is the first great mystery aboutÂ the deterioration of the American criminal justice system.

The Four Mysteries

Actually, there are four big mysteries about the deterioration of the American criminal justice system.Â You know the first. The second is,Â why did imprisonment grow exponentially? Exponential growth requires a positive feedback mechanism of some kind.Â So, what’s the feedback mechanism?

“Positive feedbacks in the system as a whole are the most reasonable explanation for spiraling imprisonment rates. Standard ârationalistâ crime-control theories predict that crime and punishment would come into a steady state equilibrium, while standard âdeprivation causes crimeâ theories predict crime cycles associated with economic cycles, but neither can account for exponential growth in imprisonment as violent crime rates stabilized or declined. “

The third mystery isÂ where is the racial disparity coming from? Why did the system become increasingly targeted on African Americans?

“Yet, in this society to an extent unlike virtually any other, those bearing the heavy burden of order-enforcement belong, in numbers far exceeding their presence in the population at large, to racially defined and historically marginalized groups. Why should this be so?“

And the fourth mystery, which I’ve really already mentioned, is why isn’t this happening anywhere other than the U.S.? What does the U.S. do differently from everybody else?

“With so many of our citizens in prison compared with the rest of the world, there are only two possibilities: Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different–and vastly counterproductive.”

I’ll answer this question right now.Â What the U.S. does differently from everybody else is disenfranchise prisoners.Â Only a couple of democratic countries come close to the U.S. in that regard, and those countries are experiencing the same exact consequences.Â The closer a country comes to the U.S. in terms of prisoner disenfranchisement, the higher its incarceration rate.Â But before I show that to you, I want you to see how lawmakers who benefit from incarceration make the prison population go up.